J. D. Sampson

Have you ever sat quietly and watched a swarm of flies float around in a cloud? I wonder why, if you try to pay attention to a single one, you might find like I did that it zig zags side to side, up and down in its own established column. You can’t track it for long, it soon becomes a part of the bigger picture again. But for those . . .

Have you ever sat quietly and watched a swarm of mosquitos float around in a cloud? I wonder why, if you try to pay attention to a single one you might find like I did that it zig zags side to side, up and down in its own column. You can’t track it for long, it soon becomes a part of the bigger picture again. But for those few seconds, before . . .

There’s a tree taped to the wall. A forest of them, actually. Though, to be fair, it’s not a forest, more a representation of one. Unless you get too close, in which case it isn’t any of those things. It’s a series of black dots and crosshatches. Up close you can see the texture of the wall beneath it. That blank, boring wall. A white one, . . .

Mountains are used in metaphor so regularly that, as a rock climber, whenever I hear it happen I can taste the bile in my throat accumulating. So often a word can become tainted by overuse and lack of creativity, that sometimes I find myself reading just to escape the monotony of everyday language. In fact, now that I think about . . .

I can hardly recall anything specific that I learned in AP English. Visualizing the half-empty classroom in the north hall of my public school I can, however, remember one thing quite clearly: unwavering attempts by the teacher to force our simple little minds into the pun-infested world of Shakespeare.